also expensive
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Getting open source and fair use products gets me fairly excited nowadays.
I got my new Fairphone 6 with e/os yesterday and it made me giddy to finally degoogle.
I'm on the framework laptop bandwagon, it's pretty cool~
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didn't find the post link again, so here is the account https://infosec.exchange/@Em0nM4stodon
The Sindene Light Guns and Flipper Zero are two products that made me excited for new tech. The big tech companies are just boring and shitty as is tradition.
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didn't find the post link again, so here is the account https://infosec.exchange/@Em0nM4stodon
on the bright side, now you can get excited about old tech!
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I don't see how gravity storage could possibly scale. Pumped hydro was the dominant storage tech, but is severely limited in geography, so there's no easy way to scale that. Solid weight gravity systems might come online at some point, but nothing about the trajectory of their development suggests they'll leapfrog chemical batteries in overall adoption.
And the battery chemistries I'm most excited about don't involve lithium at all. Sodium batteries are starting to come online, and some metal-air systems seem to be ready to hit the market soon.
To add to my initial thoughts on gravity storage, the formula for potential energy in a gravity battery is basically mass x height x 9.8 m/s^2 . The sheer amount of weight and distance necessary to store a reasonably useful amount of energy makes for very large scale engineering projects.
The typical cell phone battery holds about 4000 mAh in a 3.7V battery, which translates to about 14.8 Wh, or 53.3 kJ. In order to get the equivalent storage in a gravity systems with a 1000 kg (1 tonne) weight, you'd need to raise it about 5.4 meters, with 100% efficiency.
A Tesla battery capacity is 75 kWh for some of the long range models, which translates to 270 MJ. To store that amount of energy you'd need to raise a 1-tonne weight about 27.6 km, about 3 times the altitude of Mt Everest and more than double the typical cruising altitude of commercial passenger jets.
So the most practical real-world projects they're pursuing tend to use weights of around 20-25 tonnes in abandoned mine shafts as deep as 3km, and can recover the energy at something like 80% efficiency. Each weight can therefore store something like 735 MJ or 204 kWh (aka 3 Tesla batteries). But obviously these types of projects are very expensive and complex, and require enormous scale to be cost effective.
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on the bright side, now you can get excited about old tech!
Literally all these people going back to 1960s with satellites instead of cell towers. Trying to make it a new technology.
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didn't find the post link again, so here is the account https://infosec.exchange/@Em0nM4stodon
wrote last edited by [email protected]I'm building my own home servers, fuck your subscriptions and privacy invading tracking and ads
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As always, Apple waited until the tech matured and tried doing it the right way. It wasn't innovative but it was the best thing you can make at a price consumes can still afford.
You think consumers can afford an Apple headset? I'd argue one of the reasons it failed is that it was completely unaffordable.
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I can't remember [Alphabet] having any innovative ideas since PageRank back when they were founded.
Oh come on, they made Google Wave, that was pretty neat! And... Um... That's it I guess?
I never used Google wave, but it really didn't seem all that useful to me. But maybe it was innovative? I dunno.
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Oh yeah true. I almost pulled the trigger on there 26tb drives that are shuckabke for an extension on my nas
I'm currently hemming and hawing over upgrading the drives in my server. I've got a pair of 4TB drives are are mostly full, and it looks like I could upgrade to 10-12TB for less than $300 (I also have a new chassis that I might put into service at the same time which can hold a lot more drives, plus my wife's old CPU and MOBO would be a decent side-grade, so maybe I'll also shift to RAID-Z1 with 3-4 drives over time and an external backup drive via PBS now that it officially supports external drives)
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To add to my initial thoughts on gravity storage, the formula for potential energy in a gravity battery is basically mass x height x 9.8 m/s^2 . The sheer amount of weight and distance necessary to store a reasonably useful amount of energy makes for very large scale engineering projects.
The typical cell phone battery holds about 4000 mAh in a 3.7V battery, which translates to about 14.8 Wh, or 53.3 kJ. In order to get the equivalent storage in a gravity systems with a 1000 kg (1 tonne) weight, you'd need to raise it about 5.4 meters, with 100% efficiency.
A Tesla battery capacity is 75 kWh for some of the long range models, which translates to 270 MJ. To store that amount of energy you'd need to raise a 1-tonne weight about 27.6 km, about 3 times the altitude of Mt Everest and more than double the typical cruising altitude of commercial passenger jets.
So the most practical real-world projects they're pursuing tend to use weights of around 20-25 tonnes in abandoned mine shafts as deep as 3km, and can recover the energy at something like 80% efficiency. Each weight can therefore store something like 735 MJ or 204 kWh (aka 3 Tesla batteries). But obviously these types of projects are very expensive and complex, and require enormous scale to be cost effective.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Gridscale batteries also have the benefit of being a very good place to reuse tired automobile batteries that otherwise would just be dumped. If we can get batteries that last 10-15 years in an automobile then another 10-15 in a grid scale deployment that's far better than just lasting 15-20 years in an automobile. It also sucks that batteries completely die and have to be disposed of somehow because that's not sustainable at all, but maybe there will be advancements in the future that make that less of a problem
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Gridscale batteries also have the benefit of being a very good place to reuse tired automobile batteries that otherwise would just be dumped. If we can get batteries that last 10-15 years in an automobile then another 10-15 in a grid scale deployment that's far better than just lasting 15-20 years in an automobile. It also sucks that batteries completely die and have to be disposed of somehow because that's not sustainable at all, but maybe there will be advancements in the future that make that less of a problem
I'm not sure about technological advancements, but there might be economic developments where the price of lithium rises to be high enough that recycling the materials in old batteries becomes a no-brainer and pays for itself. Some are working on scaling lithium battery recycling, and there are serious engineering challenges involved, but the long term trends on lithium prices makes R&D in recycling a pretty attractive investment.
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didn't find the post link again, so here is the account https://infosec.exchange/@Em0nM4stodon
This thing is pretty wild. Relatively affordable too.
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You think consumers can afford an Apple headset? I'd argue one of the reasons it failed is that it was completely unaffordable.
wrote last edited by [email protected]It was on the verge of affordability. Definitely not something average consumer would buy but achievable for the upper-middle class. I was also aimed at professionals and if a device can you help do your work faster it's a great investment. The problem was it didn't let people work faster because despite all the tech it still sucked.
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Getting open source and fair use products gets me fairly excited nowadays.
I got my new Fairphone 6 with e/os yesterday and it made me giddy to finally degoogle.
Its £500 though. If they made one for like £50 I might be interested in actually buying a new phone but at that price not a chance.
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This thing is pretty wild. Relatively affordable too.
This is neat!
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It was on the verge of affordability. Definitely not something average consumer would buy but achievable for the upper-middle class. I was also aimed at professionals and if a device can you help do your work faster it's a great investment. The problem was it didn't let people work faster because despite all the tech it still sucked.
I think it was way over the verge, in fact, a few verges over in another verge entirely.
If a device can help you do your work faster it might be a great investment based on how much faster it can help you do your work. For a $3500 USD investment, the Apple AR headset would have had to make you massively more productive to justify that up-front cost, or it would have to be something you could expect to last for decades while you paid off that up-front cost with increased productivity.
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This thing is pretty wild. Relatively affordable too.
Relatively Affordable? Maybe.
Absolutely Affordable? Hell no. -
A friend of mine asked me today if there were tech companies I was excited about. The context was more "companies that will grow" not "companies that are doing something cool". But, I was stumped because I had trouble thinking of anything in either category.
Looking at the MANA MANA (do dooo do do do) group:
- Microsoft: Always shitty assholes, but their stock price will probably keep going up until the AI bubble pops
- Apple: Nothing innovative since the iPhone, but their stock will probably keep doing well because of their duopoly status and the 30% rake on the App Store
- Nvidia: I used to like their video cards, but they haven't done anything innovative for gamers since ray tracing, and even that is barely used. When the AI bubble pops they're going to crash hard
- Amazon: Assholes who screw over anybody who sells things through them, abuses their employees, and the last "innovation" they had was their patent on one-click ordering. Since AWS is most of their revenue, when the AI bubble pops their revenue will crater.
- Meta: Renamed from Facebook because their thundercunt of a CEO thought the future was "the metaverse", an obviously bad idea from the start. The company only continues to be relevant because network effects cause FOMO and they have an advertising duopoly with GOOG, heavily betting on AI now, and will crash when it crashes.
- Alphabet: Their flagship service is terrible now, but they don't care because they have such an overwhelming monopoly on search. More importantly, they're part of a massive ad duopoly with Meta, so as long as they can keep you coming back, they'll keep making money. I can't remember them having any innovative ideas since PageRank back when they were founded. They're also all in on AI and will crash when it crashes.
- Netflix: It used to be that you only needed 1 streaming service, and it was Netflix. Now the Netflix catalogue is mediocre, and they're getting rid of things that actually made people like them, like allowing a family to share a password, and a truly ad-free experience. I don't see Netflix growing much in the future, and with how bad streaming is becoming, I expect more people to pirate instead.
- Adobe: You used to be able to own photoshop, and it was a good product. Now you have to rent it, and they're not even fair and honest about how the rental works. Acrobat Reader used to be a useful free utility. Now they keep enshittifying it. Will they keep making money, probably. Probably won't crash too hard in the future either, although they're a tech stock so when the AI crash happens they'll take some damage too.
It genuinely used to feel like many of the big tech companies were trying to solve problems for end users. Sure, they wanted to make money at the same time, but they actually did provide good services. Google search used to be unbelievably good. It would find the one page on the whole Internet that was the best one for your search. If what you wanted wasn't in the first 10 links, it probably didn't exist on the Internet.. Even when it had ads, the ads were small, clearly marked, and didn't crowd out the actual search results. Netflix had a great catalogue and a great UI and zero ads so it was worth paying a bit and not pirating. Paying a Netflix subscription used to feel like sending a message to the Old Media companies that they were dinosaurs who were on their way out. Apple's iPod and iPhone were really game changers. These days it doesn't seem like any of them really want to make your life better. Instead they want to act as a rent-seeking middleman between you and whatever you want.
After thinking about it for a few minutes, the only for-profit company I could think of that was doing innovative things that made life better for its end-users was Framework. I love that they're trying to make modular laptop, and now an innovative desktop. But, there have got to be others out there I'm forgetting, I hope!
Apple died with Steve Jobs. They went from being a company whose success was based on making things that people wanted to becoming a company that only cares about “maximizing value for shareholders.” Having customers is now just an inconvenience.
Late stage Capitalism in action.
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Apple died with Steve Jobs. They went from being a company whose success was based on making things that people wanted to becoming a company that only cares about “maximizing value for shareholders.” Having customers is now just an inconvenience.
Late stage Capitalism in action.
It also feels like they’re trying to be like Steve but without any creativity.
I don’t think he’d ever have thought VR was a big deal, for example.
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This thing is pretty wild. Relatively affordable too.
When you need something more esoteric than the Oculus Rift and even less user-friendly.
